Wednesday, November 9, 2016

As a shocked U.S. - and a concerned world - reviews its response and electoral duty to maintain what is supposed to be the best and most possible about recovery, aspiration, and The American Dream, the fondness with which yesteryear is recalled - that feeling of stability and warmth and progress that comes from the best of the traditional - do not include, in 2016, being a Stepford Wife, a doorstop, or that nice lady on the front of the syrup, as an excuse or replacement for being robbed, maimed, tormented, and financially abused. The little old ladies bankrupted by the AGF scandal will not sign to make the transition easy, despite being bullied......again.

The real concern now will be the world's response to the regression of progress. And it will come, along with a disturbing cultural divide and a widening, saddened gap between the extremes of political viewpoints, unfortunately - just as we had begun to build bridges of understanding.

Let us hope that that does not extend to debate, at a time when the seeking of knowledge to avoid repeated mistakes will be more valuable then ever, from an inexperienced, arrogant, and bewildered non-statesman.

And women, one hopes, will not begin to view themselves as complete once their child-bearing responsibilites have come to an end....and their life as an adult, in an adult world, begins - no matter who insists on keeping us there for their own convenience and ineptness.

I sneaked across the border -- it was threatening rain --So I could stand in this tunnel, waiting for the roaring trainAnd watch those black kids working out kung fu movesIf you don't want to be the horses' hoofprints you got to be the hoovesHear that lonesome violin playSee the notes float up into the overcastAnd change to white birds as they sail on throughAnd soar away free into incandescent bluePeople getting ready behind all those rectangles of light"Put on your grin mask, babe, you know we're steppin out tonight"You hear that sound, like hammers only small?It's what the people's heads say when they beat them against the wallHear that lonesome violin playSee the notes float up into the overcastAnd change to white birds as they sail on throughAnd soar away free into incandescent blueConcrete vortex sucks down the windIt's howling like a blinded violin.Oh -- tongues of fire, come and kiss my browIf I ever needed you, well I need you nowHear that lonesome violin playSee the notes float up into the overcastAnd change to white birds as they sail on throughAnd soar away free into incandescent blue

I have pondered, mightily - and with a certain wonderment - why, in these last hours, anyone would find themselves in a quandary, as far as voting for President of the United States.

I think that one must, needs be, examine WHY they are voting, and, in doing so, and with a heart quieted by gentle, firm, and underestimated friendships, affirm, anew, the sensibility, (as we move, somewhat warily, and haltingly, forward) of like beings, within the confines of the human condition, and all its foibles, hopes, trials, strivings, and achievements.

At its simplest, one must seriously examine - like any good committee or observer or interviewer - the candidate for the job. Apart from any personal, traditional, non-traditional, religious or geopolitical "isms", we must simply look with fairness, with shrewdness, and with consideration, at who will DO the job;, who has continued in the midst of difficulty, who has the experience - Proven Experience - who has maintained, despite personal difficulty and setback, a presence and strength within other administrations where the Wheel has been in other hands.....in order to make those hands stronger, in the midst of faltering, and who maintains stability in the midst of trial and tribulation, while, at the same time, seeking counsel, considering it, and using their own considerable and formidable intelligence to find....The Way.

This has provided many doors for others looking for leadership, in ways and in moments of which we may be mightily unaware. It has protected human beings from ego and destruction, in places we cannot imagine, who sought refuge in its strength and comfort in its continuance. This is how human striving works: we strengthen each other in ways of which Wordsworth spoke, in hushed and sacred tones, as "life breath which moves through all things." The glow and the spark and the continuance in the face of true evil, are of God. The vows are real, and the loyalties are continuing, through Test.

When a reasonable human being, considerate and conscious of past work history, personal trials, loyalty, and steadfastness under pressure does this....there is no choice. The choice is Hillary Clinton.

As a woman, I have considered with quiet shrewdness, albeit longing, the idea of "firsts". The first of Indira Ghandi; the first of Joan of Arc; the first Roberta Bondar - astronaut and Anglican, (the last, like me, and yet, unafraid and hopeful).

Firsts are often romantic and idealistic notions of a real hope for progress and achievement beyond walls we cannot hurdle in ignorance, goals we are prevented from achieving, and potentials unrealized, because of barbaric assertions of insecurity and personal weakness on the part of those who promulgate and enforce this sensibility, in all walks of life.

There are first loves, first children, first steps, first failures, first deaths, first.....rejections.

But...this reaction to The First Madame President shows fear, not strength: weakness, not belief and encouragement, and the final, shared realization by Men of possibility, of new understanding, of true recognition of equality....of Life, when it happens.

It is a nod to the Maternal presence within tribe, the Regal unspoken and readily acknowledged responsibility of duty and expected strength in the cultures of ancient and longheld societies, only recently disrespected and forgotten. It is an easy and strong, linking of arms with Partner and Friend, with a deep understanding of personal weakness, of the appetite of power, but the true and lasting understanding of how we empower and strengthen each other in moments of doubt, even within the most private moments of grief in relationship, in perceived and possibly pitied moments of personal implosion from which we must recover and move ahead, through the excruciating and the malady of misunderstanding that is the pressure of Power. To do so, is to be Extraordinary, and Human.

Many feminists, ripe with the fresh hurt of acknowledged failure in personal loyalties, misunderstand this - to our weakness, since I am one. Many young feminists take for granted the "normals" that they now enjoy, and so are alienated further from cultures - dangerously - having forgotten repression within their own. Rather than distancing ourselves from these moments, to acknowledge, share, and move through them mean that we recognize the foibles of humanity, and how the weaker among women still persist in believing themselves strong only when we become objects: of desire, of unrealistic platitudes, of decorative, useless function....of the moment.

They graduate beyond these images of themselves, as Hillary Clinton, humble in her pantsuits and spectacles, and bereft of the facade and glitz of a Donald Trump and his "hair sculpt"....which only covers virility, after all (she says, with an affectionate wink) showed us, as women. Her greatest concern was that this might show weakness, when she was, like most of us, intent on ....so many other things, frankly. Alas: the temptation of glamour demanded the Ronald Reagan, the film star.....the Glamour Girl. Infuriated with its penchant for the Perfect Package, it forgot.....the Rock of Ages. The Rock of Ages made us homemade Halloween costumes, worked a double shift to pay for the school trip, gave us their favourite boots, when we couldn't swing the funds for a new pair, and needed them more.....real moments of real women....who didn't particularly need to call themselves REAL WOMEN....we just knew we were. We still do. We walk, unashamed, expecting respect, and acquiring it, for acknowledged participation, among Men.

We didn't compete with our brothers - we paved the way for them, stood as they walked towards us, walked beside them, spoke of others about their strengths and their suitability, proudly, and without guile, or jealousy, or untruth. We understood that beyond the envy and immaturity that is taught to so many women to prevent them from encouraging each other - and a product of fearful men who cannot share power - we finally understood that to be represented by them, was to finally have a face beyond that nameless, futureless, voiceless one: maimed, dispirited, laden with the wrong sexuality.......invisible.

The vessel is used by God, it is said. It is used by God, or used by Nemesis. Oh, that Nemesis did not steal an ending.

Gratefully, the woman's hand that finds another way, understands the bravado of Men, mourns loss but mourns an inability to Try Again, (often misunderstood within the body, proper), is the one that will not mock my consideration and my understanding.....of all these things, in Life - and my demand, that it is Capable.

Martin Luther King Jr. raises an ironic brow, approvingly, in my heart, in Defiance...in Bravery. It is a sober example of extremities of hope and Hatred, never forgotten. These are still Real in a confused and difficult world, however hopeful, but we must not show Fear in the face of what wants us to Fail, mocked.

It means that Donald Trump's sudden inspiration in the organization and administration of progressive Immigration policies is a rather late, and somewhat sheepish, realization of the unsuitability of reaction in situations of grave consequence and political stability, however wellmeant and soberly considered. This will help no one in Def Con three.

Honey Boo Boo awaits its result, while the rest of the world quietly, and with renewed vigour, continues with the striving of progress - gritting and gruelling and objectionable as it sometimes gets - when the Wheel changes Hands, understanding that all around is a deep understanding that that
Hand needs to be STEADY, in the face of unimaginable bullying and taunting.

Not one to bare teeth without followthrough....Mrs. Clinton is up to the task, surrounded by the wise
and the wonderful, the spirited and the destitute....still hoping.

The fear that somehow, Democrats do not defend the free, is simply - intruded upon as it might be at present - UNTRUE. In a room full of people with different views, bullying - no matter who does it - will always show itself to be itself, petty and desperate in its methods and its means, thwarted.
and the wonderful, the hopeful and the destitute.....still hoping. Still Dreaming. Still Defended. Still supported.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Behold; the storied pastoral landscape, alive with singsong cricket and cicada's chirping,
Harbingers of the morning's larger, musicked throng.
In close ink of night, small residents of field and farm, pasture and portion, chortle the quiet ruminations undisturbed, and
sing the expected song of daily practice and expectation, in time with the murk of moontide.

And yet.....a pause in the mantra.

An eruption of thought, errant and long repressed; controlled harpy shriek and rage contained within the quiet certitude of docile social order - expressed groan of the land, expelled.

The polite certitude and smug assurance with which the imposition and carefully-structured drudgery is inflicted is precise; pointed....unrelenting and upheld with the same hands that
wave with vehemence "we hold these truths to be self-evident".....relaying with dull eyes a kind of vapid, blank acknowledgement of sound, like the lifelessness of a rosary strangled by rote, the words lost in the thick, viscous phlegm of an assured future of misunderstood freedom, choking on its mockery.

Expedience looms like sharpened shadows, reaching into and amidst the private dreams, the unpainted, still shock of the defiant rosebud, the bursting gladiola, the wild and winsome snapdragon, marking the expert boundaries of the furrowed rows with blinks of unbelonging and inappropriate, unfruitful beauty. Uncaring, the snapdragons frame the labour in portraiture of unsung greatness, decorative and momentary. They are crushed, suddenly, by a hard boot, unseen, while the wild and miniature hand close behind stops, delight in the tug that steals the unexpected petals to furtive, transported beauty in a cracked cup, its fragrance the childish hope of stronger comforting ghosts.

Far away, the groan washes the blowing earth in the grey light with eerie wail, rotes unheard, small hands stilled......boots crunching on scorched and jangling bones.

We are here, and here, and here, when winds carry siren songs of birds, and blood-washed soil reveals the lie of unquenched Death's unceasing thirst. And yet, we are nowhere, safe in the polite vanquishing of that step away that is a breath and silence of
nothing to do.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Its goals are lofty, its ideals are the stuff of the best of man's aspirations, practices, and beliefs, and its precepts - presumably, and by definition - are supposedly reflective of what its most precious values keep sacred, in the daily infrastructures of a free and just society.

And yet.....not until 1947 did Quebec officially recognize the equality of women, and allow them to vote. Think about that. Slaves were emancipated from the Deep South of the United States and FLED to this country ....and women could not participate, legally, in the official declaration of the idea of freedom, within the very democracy that supposedly rescued other human beings from institutional bondage.

For all of our discussions of language, inclusion, cultural representation, religious, sexual, and minority-driven equalities......the Second World War did not include women who could officially vote in Quebec. Little is said by a smug Nation about the reality of its history,and its treatment, of women.

Herded onto official plots of land deemed not threatening enough to deter "progress", blood percentage quotas were also "officially" imposed upon the main aboriginal inhabitants of the country by its "officials" in order to determine and institutionalize governmental subsistence, intertribal racism, caste mentality, and "dependences" which were encouraged and instituted as "equal", while instantly creating a "removed citizen" system which isolated, "zooed" and reduced its First Nations generationally. They created pogroms of the popular, with punishment-popular systems of accountability and shaming with little or no ways and means for governmental and operational foundation-building training....and then, having reduced recipients to recalcitrant child status, moaned about waste and accountability, when the imposed system began to implode. The well-crafted "problem child Frankenstein" failed to perform like the much-hoped-for sainted dancing bear.

Only recently have some of these systemic norms been acknowledged, recognized, and exposed for the ways in which they have "retarded" normal societal growth and inculcated gross misunderstandings, terrible degradations, and complete ignorance about who, what and why the idea of "status" came to be in the first place.

Recent footage revealed the horrific poverty and alarming suicide rates of people in the Far North. More alarming, amidst supposed increases in connectivity and "available wealth" was, simply, a sense of hopelessness in the young....and the elderly. Removed from a knowledge of their own tradition, the void between the two, and the lack of understanding, had become vast, and disturbing.

Having been used up, wrung out, and exploited, the "discomfort" that is "the difficult Aunt" of representational democracy, having been patted on the hand and quietly shut up in the attic to pay off everyone's bills, would not go away, amidst the hypocrisy, the glamour, the new beauty, and the remembered hours of double overtime shifts worked, like most people, with the idea of it resulting in a life made better by work and effort. Alas....1947, a propensity for enjoying the practice of patronizing hope, and the convenience of "putting them uppity niggers to good use" saw the dignity, honour, and belief in the idea of service, denigrated and debased with a viciousness and focus usually reserved for a truly threatening enemy. Education, hope, and equality, responding in bewilderment, looked around in horror, and recognized how easily enslavement of "one for all the rest who found it convenient" - oblivious to the shadows of the six million gassed to death in a fever pitch of focused and furious group envy - was allowed to continue, unchecked.

The artist, aghast at the distortion of freedom and law, retreated, wounded.......

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Mine's a workaday thought, bound by matter.
When I close my eyes, I see it rise above the various pros and trons, electras and newts,
Winged, like all those
Higher BeingsI see pictures of, when I have a moment away from
Tidying Up.

All this order, and disorder....tidy, tidy tidy.
The rain broom sweeps the dust particles and glinted motes in the sunlight,
A reminder of the wondrous Moments, breathed into
When the matter took shape,
And Mattered.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Oh, if this dirt could blow a carbon image of dream's imagining,
Then I might curve around, star-like
A universe contained in the eyes
of
Undiscovered, known.

Woulds't thou see, in elements undetermined, form, and fan, and fly,
Amidst the shifting winds of Time?
These shells.....these shells we inhabit - these gifts of function -
Permit us to share Each Other.
In the doing, when our minds are allowed - oh, such Brevity, Darling Mine! -
Circumference completion.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Thoughts and prayers going out today for the terrified 61,000 people fleeing raging fires in Fort McMurray, Alberta today, as the military is called in to assist people trying to escape, after a major exit south of the city was blocked by fire earlier yesterday. This is the largest evacuation due to disaster in Alberta's history....please stay "Caring and Canadian", as people escape, literally from an 80-foot wall of flames with their lives. Please help when you can, and in whatever way you can, during this terrible and frightening time for them....!No prayer is ever wasted.

The exquisite ice of harbour cocoon,
Insistent as the protective parental arms of a a joined and fearless Omniscient Sentinel
Fiercely remind hearth and heart and hurt,
Stopped,
That green and good and go and giving
Inevitable and interdependent as the mystery of Love,
Are alliterative alerts
To the infinite and complex simplicity that is
God and All.

A Better Resurrection

I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
A lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.

a gentle note:

The person who you might mistake for not reacting enough
Might be holding shards together inside.